Future Music

When George Antheil was three-years-old, he wanted a piano for his birthday. Instead of a normal-sized one, his parents gifted him a toy version instead. He brought the imposture down to the basement, he said, and smashed it to pieces with a small hatchet.

That violent episode, he recalled years later in a taped interview, was an indication of where his theories of music composition would turn.

With the premiere of his Ballet mecaniqueat the fashionable Theatre de Champs-Elysees on July 19, 1926, the effect was comparable to his demolishing a piano onstage. Parallels were drawn instantly between the performance and the 1913 debut of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which had been met with an equally riotous backlash. However, there was something different about Antheil’s kinetic music. The ballet is a 19-minute glimpse into the latter part of the 20th century. It’s an outrageous stomping titan, with inklings of what the future might sound like: mechanical, sarcastic, hyperactive—simultaneously a warning and a glorifying of technologies to come.